Tom has consoled himself about the loss of so many workers by zipping himself into a boiler suit and absorbing several construction roles. There are still six men on site, and two of them he knows pretty well. One of them is Dag. He has warmed to Dag considerably over the last while, not only because of how industrious and intelligent Dag has proven himself to be, but because Aurelia urged Tom to take Dag on. Dag is a kind of link back to her, a remnant of a time that floods Tom with warmth. And so, when Tom claps eyes on him now, he feels something return to his limbs, an old energy that reconnects him to the world.

‘How’s it going, mate?’ Tom asks, planting a hand on Dag’s shoulder.

‘Pretty g-g-good, mate,’ Dag says with a grin, and he pulls off a glove and wipes sweat off his forehead. Tom notices that Dag’s T-shirt is soaked with sweat. It’s barely five degrees, Tom is wearing a thermal vest beneath his boiler suit, and gloves lined with sheepskin. He looks over the steel framework and grins. For the last three weeks Dag has been painstakingly drilling through the cliff face to insert the thirty-mm-wide, twenty-foot-long iron rods that will secure the lower level of the house to the cliff.

‘How many more do you have to do?’ Tom asks.

‘Seven,’ Dag says, and Tom does a quick calculation in his head. Two days per rod. He frowns. Another fortnight just to secure the foundations is longer than he’d like.

Dag clocks the frown. ‘M-m-maybe if I get some more men to work with me we can cut that time right down,’ he says quickly. ‘Dad spoke with a new t-team yesterday. They just finished up a p-project in Stavanger. It’s likely they won’t have … won’t have heard about …’ He trails off, lowers his eyes. Tom feels as though he’s been punched in the gut. ‘I mean …’ Dag begins again, trying to sweep the inference out of the air. He meant the ghost, Tom thinks, his guts churning and his blood boiling. His disgust at his own team of construction workers downing tools and abandoning their jobs because of a rumour, a rumour about a haunted site, no less, has hardened to fury. What is this, he thinks, the sixteenth bloody century? Norway isn’t some red-necked, backwoods country. It’s a place of intelligent, progressive thinkers and pioneers, not superstitious morons.

But of course, that’s not why they’ve abandoned their jobs, he realizes. Clive hasn’t paid them. That’s the real reason.